[SkyMarshal]

> For that case, it's harder to argue that Nix is worth spending the time compared to just slowly setting up each computer manually.

Actually that’s an even better justification for using NIx instead of slowly setting up each computer manually.

If you’re setting up a new computer every week, or even every month, you tend to remember all the packages, configs, and tweaks you need just from frequently doing it.

But if you need to set up a computer once a year, you forgot all that stuff, making it even more valuable to have it all scripted in a deterministic build.

This blog post “Erase Your Darlings” discusses this issue, along with a really interesting solution to it:

https://grahamc.com/blog/erase-your-darlings

[lilyball]

So much this. I’ve been setting up a new computer recently, first time in a while, and in the process I’ve been moving a bunch of stuff into Nix that was previously ad-hoc, specifically so I don’t have to remember about this again (and especially since I know I’ll be setting up another computer again in the near future). I even finally adopted nix-darwin and home manager in order to move more things under the Nix umbrella.